So I could see the other argument here: I’m presenting from a presentation, I want to switch to a live demo environment, and to do so I need to turn off the presentation entirely?
Now, another operating system might see this tension and say: why not have a UI element come up, and ask the user whether they want to share their entire screen or stay on the existing shared window?
Here, I think this hits a fundamental weakness in Apple’s design culture: if you want to make things magical by removing options from users, occasionally you’re going to hit something that’s impossible to do without giving the user control. And if anything, Apple’s culture has been overtuned towards not providing that control, if at all possible.
Nobody wants complexity for complexity’s sake, but this is the type of thing that should have come up in a meeting, and someone didn’t feel empowered to bring it up.
It's a while since I used Airplay for anything other than Youtube videos, but here is how I thought it worked:
1. If I choose to Airplay from the control center, it mirrors the whole screen (or possibly also extends as a second screen). Whatever I open on the iPad (or drag to the second screen) is what the audience sees.
2. If I Airplay from inside an app with presentation mode, it works similar to Airplaying a video. That one app remains active even if I switch to another app.
3. To switch what gets presented, I simply start a new Airplay session: from control center if I want to switch to sharing the whole screen, or to another app if I want that app's presentation mode. This doesn't have to be automatic, but I shouldn't have to actively close the old session to start a new one.
4. To switch back to a previous presentation, I open that app back up and re-enable Airplay - there could be a button to "resume presentation".
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how that is too complicated. It seems rather intuitive that if I'm sharing a specific app window, I didn't mean to share the whole thing. (And it's also intuitive that if I actively start a new share, that takes over from the old one. No need to actively close the old share first.)
I think there’s a solution that fits within the Apple Design culture that they already use. If you’re connected to a display you can already click the “AirPlay” icon to change the audio output location. (Eg I’m connected to a display via usbc cable but want the audio to go to a Bluetooth device or headphones)
So, just let me select the app that gets the display output. And make “share screen” a discrete choice.
The "magic" here should be that whichever app was last explicitly cast to an external display should be the one that keeps casting to that display until the user chooses from a different app to cast it to the external display.
I think the counter-argument you posed is the weaker of the two. You of course know you want to switch to displaying the live demo environment instead of the presentation you chose to cast to the display, but there's no way the OS can reasonably infer that, so it shouldn't.
> Here, I think this hits a fundamental weakness in Apple’s design culture: if you want to make things magical by removing options from users, occasionally you’re going to hit something that’s impossible to do without giving the user control. And if anything, Apple’s culture has been overtuned towards not providing that control, if at all possible.
> UI element come up, and ask the user whether they want to share their entire screen
Better yet, allow for a dock on the extended screen, that lists all apps that have feature support for another monitor. The dock will have an app to duplicate screen 1. However, Control of this dock will have to be done via mouse / trackpad, because touch is not available on second screen..
>I’m presenting from a presentation, I want to switch to a live demo environment, and to do so I need to turn off the presentation entirely?
Ideally, a well-designed live demo app would also support presentation mode. Switching to it (e.g., via Alt-Tab or swiping) would automatically update the external display.
The external screen would act like a dedicated full-screen view for any app in presentation mode. If no app is in that mode, it would stay blank (not show the home screen) - unless the home screen itself has presentation mode enabled.
Anyone preparing a presentation should and do tend to set everything up and test it in advance. Apps that support presentation mode can keep control of the external display and let you switch between them smoothly, so all that preparation pays off.
Not a live demo app, a live demo environment for an app. Your suggestion would mean every app would use presentation mode, which makes the concept worthless.
> this is the type of thing that should have come up in a meeting, and someone didn’t feel empowered to bring it up
I was completely agreeing with you until this statement at the very end.
How do you know it didn't come up in a meeting and that Apple isn't full of assholes who channel their inner (wildly distorted perception of) Steve Jobs to shut down dissent? If there's any place where a whole goddamn committee could be that delusional about its own nature, it's Apple. The company got way too big for its own good a very long time ago.
You're spot on otherwise. It's the fundamental reason why everyone who does hates Apple.
The endless struggle of professional iPad users trying to get their hardware to act like something it insists it is not.
Ultimately the team behind it doesn't want to relinquish control to the user, so we're stuck in this world where it can never truly by a professional tool because every step of the way there is something like this where on a real computer its just an extra screen and you put on what you want on it and the situation where content of the other screen gets suddenly shown can't happen. But the iPad has to pretend screens don't exist and only apps do.
Apple needs to get their software design on track again and do proper QA and testing on their software before making these kinds of changes. 27 was supposed to be a quality improvement snd bugfix release, but it's mostly been a cascade of bugs and UI failures.
Judging by what OP is describing this isn't a bug, it's a functionality change they thought was better. And they might even be right for the majority of users. But OP has a valid use case that's broken by the change.
Yea, the problem is Apple thought this was an UI improvement, but actually broke a common usage pattern. This kind of change should definitely be a setting, and considered thoroghly before changing the default. This is poor design and lack of QA, not a bug, per se. But the result is even worse because it means the previous functionality likely isn't coming back.
X.0 releases are always a mess at launch. Even everyone's beloved Snow Leopard had issues at launch, despite everyone remembering it as the perfect version of OSX.
> This could be the first time I’ve ever downgraded an Apple OS.
> As we speak I’m downgrading the Snow Leopard partition on my trusty old Core Duo 2006 MacBook Pro back to Leopard (and while I’m at it, I’m finally getting around to upgrading the FreeBSD partition to 8.0!). I kept waiting for updates to fix the severe stability problems in the Finder, my FireWire 800 ExpressCard and my iMovie HD plugins, but I’ve decided to give up for now.
I know the OP was about iPadOS but same rules apply. Give the OS 27s a few minor version bumps and it'll stabilize. I'd argue OS 26's were worse at launch but they've gotten pretty stable in the last few updates (still ugly as sin on macOS though, Golden Gate is a huge improvement visually)
Apple marketing teams are brilliant and can figure out a “quality first” angle to help Ternus announce & defend a slowdown for Apple software teams.
In a paradigm of quality-focused releases every other year, what if they released the betas two years of their new-feature releases ahead of time? & superfunded QA & maybe even responded to every bug report (at least “acknowledged, thank you” & filling out the “Recent Similar Reports:” column). Could even the new-feature releases be just as low-defect as the quality-focused ones?
Slightly too extreme but… If they pretend software’s like their brand new iPhone hardware, that it needs a multi-billion-dollar recall if they make a big enough mistake, maybe that mindset would be a good balance (as I don’t feel hardware innovation’s been stifled by that reality, that it better be dang perfect).
I remember 10.6.6 being the perfect version. At least, if you owned the 2010 MacPro. It was perfect as it was the last OS that was compatible with that hardware.
iOS 26 made clear that apple completely lost their UX advantage they had in the past. A lot of things were changed to "look better", while completely ignoring that it made UX worse. I think they just lost the people and the know-how to design good UX. Just making it look "pretty" is not good UX.
Exactly, they lost all the attention to detail, all the pursuit of clarity, all that was abandoned.
IMHO it's far less "pretty" than before too, in addition to just being an outright mess. And that's when it's working as intended.
There's still loads of obvious bugs in dark mode, where there's completely incompatible outlines and rounded rectangles with incompatible radii and overlapping elements that are clearly not intended.
That's on top of how the individual UX elements were mangled to fit into poor categorization schemes, with unnecessary complexity. Two things that bite me every single day are the completely overcomplicated screenshot interface that slows interaction by a great deal, and navigating to Safari history, which requires tapping a "Bookmarks" button.
And on macOS, the pointless visual noise of icons by menu items, that are each indecipherable, incoherent, and inconsistent between apps.. It's just unprofessional all around. I'm not surprised that the VP responsible left that same year, but there's been no fix, which is awful.
That's because back then, they weren't releasing major new versions every year.
Snow Leopard had time to mature. These days with their yearly release cycles, the OS doesn't have time to mature anymore. Right when they get done fixing most of the problems, the next version comes out and everything is broken all over again. And they repeat this cycle year after year. It makes no sense.
My iPhone 14 Pro 1TB finally broke down too much to remain usable a couple of weeks ago.
The screen shattered when the phone hit the floor. White and green lines on one side, making reading things more difficult and also straining on the eyes to look at at night. Since then, cracks in the screen cut my fingers ever ever so slightly on each touch. Not enough to make wounds, but enough to be discomfortable. I tried to use it still but over the next couple of days I dropped the phone on accident multiple times and now the touchscreen is not reacting as it should either. Some parts of the screen do not respond to touch at all, other parts still work, and others yet misregister where the touch is.
I investigated replacing the screen at third party phone shops. But it doesn’t make sense to pay to repair the screen. I was already living with a battery that was due to be replaced. And beyond that some hardware issue is preventing NFC from working since a year ago, so I can’t scan my passport NFC to renew my national bank id on it anyway either. Apple Pay doesn’t work, probably also because of the broken NFC. Finally, for whatever reason whenever I try to update iOS it fails saying it can’t verify the update after having downloaded it. Paying ~$200+ to replace the screen and battery and still having these other issues (NFC broken, and stuck on an older iOS version than it should) just wouldn’t be worth it.
I’ve been thinking long and hard about what phone to buy next for quite a while. And now that the screen broke and I was forced to make a decision I decided to not buy the latest greatest iPhone 18 Pro.
Because I am not as happy with Apple the company and their actions as I used to be.
I don’t want Android either however.
I ended up buying an iPhone 15 Pro 1TB second hand with good battery health. It gets me USB-C so that’s a plus compared to the 14 Pro I had.
All that is to say, no it’s not a given that we will keep buying new hardware from Apple directly anymore even if we did in the past used to buy our stuff new from them when time came to replace our old Apple devices. Of course even buying second hand is still supporting Apple indirectly to some degree. Because the people that do buy new from them know that a couple years later the amount they can sell that device for second hand to someone else is still pretty ok, relatively speaking.
Does Apple even have QA anymore? Do they even do user testing? I know a lot of people who have left Apple testing and validation in the past few years and every new macos and ios release is buggier than before. Insanely basic stuff where anyone actually using the app for a few days would have caught glaring UI and usability problems. I haven't worked there, but what I can see with my own two eyes makes me assume they've automated the hell out of usability testing. Maybe software is only being tested by other software. Maybe developers are the only people testing their own features. Many of the bugs I'm seeing today are iphone4 bad. How did no one ever pick up the phone and hold it in their damn hand? And on top of that, it certainly seems like they're hyper-focused on new features and are utterly ignoring foundational systems that everything runs on. Preview, Mail, and Finder are going down the tubes fast. I intentionally don't update my personal macbook because I see so many bugs in each new release on my work macbook.
It could be that they're doing what Microsoft did 10 years ago, they fired all their QA teams and replaced them with automatic tests and telemetry. It's part of the reason Windows breaks so much these days.
I'm sure they saved a ton of money though.
> [iPhone 4] How did no one ever pick up the phone and hold it in their damn hand?
That's well documented, all their field testing models were disguised as iPhone 3Gs with a rubber case around them. Gizmodo got their hands on one from a drunk engineer who left it in a bar.
So they didn't actually touch it with their bare hands ever, outside of the office at least.
I had heard 27 was much better than 26, so I broke my usual embargo on new macOS versions until x.y.5 and upgraded. I also had a problem with the 26.6.7(?) update that came out the same day as 27.0, so I went for it. Big mistake. I regret it.
I also regret updating my homepods and ATV to 27.0. I had lots of phantom clicks on the tv remote. Turns out it was the homepods. When it happens I have to restart them to fix it.
Never again. I will be on 27.x.y until 28.6 is released.
The thing is, despite the damage since 18 not being fully undone, 27 gets comparative praise because of 26's disaster lowering the bar.
I am sadly not seeing a recovery trend, they get less trigger happy with big changes but the lowered attention to detail and QA is still present. Maybe it takes time to turn the ship, hopefully they'll get there. I moved to linux though.
yeah, for the first two days it was great since it was much less sluggish than Tahoe.
but window management is fucked. the menu bar just disappears randomly. the window controls on a fullscreen window don't render (thankfully you can still click them). if you click too fast in mission control it just goes all black.
yesterday i plugged in an extra monitor and found another bug. enable mission control, both screens show the windows, clicking on a window on the main screen focuses that window. clicking on a window on the secondary screen however doesn't focus it, it just passes the click right into the window as if mission control wasn't on.
If it’s any consolation, I typically do the same timing on my device updates. Still on Sequoia and 26.6.x and was considering upgrading earlier than usual. I will stick to the delayed cadence.
I just updated my iPad to 27 the other day and it's incredible how much of it is simply broken now. Luckily I haven't updated anything else yet (and now I don't plan to).
I upgraded my MacBook pro and iPad just for the touchscreen experience when I'm extending my screen to the iPad. Big mistake. I was on Sequoia until then which was incredibly stable. I don't have the time and energy to fresh install sequoia, so I guess I'll just keep using it until Apple fixes 27 or until my patience runs out and I do a clean install of Sequoia
I see comments on posts like this complaining that Apple has the money to make software as high-quality as their hardware so they must be dysfunctional.
I'm not sure it's so easy. I think you have to compromise on hardware or software and Apple makes a choice.
My whole career in embedded devices, software is always under schedule pressure from hardware. Not because hardware is sloppy or evil, but because doing new things is hard and hardware has deadlines that software doesn't.
Like, I think the lessons are that all the money in the world still can't buy you time and even Apple can't keep a lid on feature creep.
It was an existing software feature who's behavior was broken in an update, not a bug to do with integrating new hardware or something. There are always difficulties but I'm not sure how to connect this to a time crunch from new hardware delivery.
> My whole career in embedded devices, software is always under schedule pressure from hardware. Not because hardware is sloppy or evil, but because doing new things is hard and hardware has deadlines that software doesn't.
The problem is the internet made post-release patches practical, which made software deadlines more flexible, which then allows management to choose a cheaper and less rigorous QA process.
Hardware is kinda like software in 1994 (just read about console game QA from the 80s/90s): you can't realistically patch defects after release, so you can't be sloppy.
It's an illustration of why technological constraints aren't all bad, and "progress" can cause regressions.
On the other hand, post-release patches made very complex software practical. And very complex software takes a very long time to test and people want the new stuff now.
There is no easy or even single "correct" answer. Just trade-offs.
There's a pretty big difference between embedded devices and high-end, general-purpose devices. Apple is very much the latter. Outside specific areas (like cell signal/etc) they are not constrained by hardware to the point that it inevitably impacts software quality—and the complaints people have are not about the parts of the software that are constrained! As far as I know, everybody is actually totally happy with Apple's wireless stack, power management and so on.
Now, is it possible that Apple's software issues are proximally caused by production pressure? Absolutely. That's almost definitely a major contributor. But the production pressure is not inherent to their device business; it's a choice the organization, collectively, makes.
Let’s not beat around the bush. Whoever made this decision in Apple seems pretty close to flat out evil.
There must be at least tens of thousands of ipad users globally (on ipads capable of upgrading to 27) who would would find this a critical loss.
To not mention this at all, not even in fine print release notes, while pushing people to upgrade knowing they cant ever downgrade back in the future, is just sabotage one step removed.
Especially as they did not offer any alternative way to access the functionality.
Yes. Apple is a behemoth, heavy with layers and layers of middle management. It's pretty difficult to steer it any new direction and have everyone on board.
I think it would need a big restructuring with strong, smart product leadership. I'm dubious they have that now, despite the image Apple PR is orchestrating in the press with Ternus as the new CEO.
Having worked at Microsoft at the time that comic was made, you need to understand that it also had more groups and it was fractal, zoom in and there are guns everywhere. Microsoft created a system where every silo was in competition with every other silo. As an example, I viewed this from the sidelines, during this time there was MS Messenger and MSN messenger which both supposedly worked together with the same backend except it didn't because whenever MSN wanted to add a fun feature they had their hand slapped by the MS Messenger team and visa versa. It was a shitty experience and I'm glad I left.
Seems to me like it was an explicit design decision that fixed some use cases and broke others, rather than a regression in the sense of "A bug we introduced but didn't catch." As such a regression test wouldn't have caught this.
Someone made a design decision that broke some use cases.
When you're a gatekeeper / the phone company like Apple, the expectation is that as a general purpose device, you will adhere to at least some level of quality... simply because users have no alternative.
By constantly enforcing their walled garden and making it harder to use alternatives, Apple assumes the responsibility for the quality of their software. If they can't deliver, they should make it easy to pick and choose alternatives.
Somehow Garmin is even worse than Apple in that regard. Their mobile device hardware is (generally) quite good: robust and reliable with lots of little touches that serious athletes appreciate. But somehow they just can't get their act together on the software quality side. Everyone knows not to buy a new device at launch because it will suffer from frequent software glitches and crashes which take them at least a few months to fix. And even then, new releases frequently have regression defects that break existing features. Whether this is a deliberate choice or just general incompetence I have no idea.
I don't like the "deliberate choice or general incompetence" framing. It just isn't useful. What's both more likely and more interesting is to speculate on the specific mechanisms and forces that might lead to this sort of situation.
For example, perhaps the knowledge that firmware updates are possible for modern consumer devices means that the software teams have a higher risk tolerance when it comes to feature creep. They've been able to fix bugs in the past, and it was no big deal. It certainly wouldn't involve scrapping existing inventory or retooling anything in the production line like you might have to for a hardware defect.
Or, and this reflects my own experience as a software person, perhaps broader changes in software development culture are partially to blame. 15 years ago one of the first lines of defense for the team I was on was the project manager. As the one person whose only job was keeping a more holistic eye on the value chain, she often caught latent quality risks (e.g., the potential for two different in-development features to adversely interact) long before anything made it to QA. Nowadays most companies, in a lovely iteration of the doorman fallacy, have nixed that role because they believe Jira can do the job.
I've got similar feelings about Scrum. I have been on Scrum teams that were great at delivering consistently high quality software. But they were the exception. The more common situation is people rushing to merge a glut of changes on days n and n-1 of an n day sprint, every n days, forever. Which, regardless of what any manager says, is how they're de facto expected to behave. Taking two or three more days to get the job done properly would screw up the metrics on some KPI dashboard.
No one makes Apple release new products. There is a choice about the balance of releasing something and the quality of that release. Blaming that choice on anything but the people making it is nonsense.
I don’t know. Embedded software makes things way harder on itself than is necessary by tying itself to the comparative Stone Age in terms of language, tooling, and methodology. At least in the automotive & robotics world I interact with. I can’t believe how much time is unnecessarily pissed down a hole because everyone is just stuck doing the thing they know how to cobble together today instead of reforming what they do and how they do it.
>all the money in the world still can't buy you time
The people who actually get the money being made are the ones who want more money asap. They are the ones who set the (often unrealistic) timelines so that they can line their pockets sooner. After all, those yacht payments are coming due.
I've been told that software is treated as a BOM cost in embedded with a fixed cost and it being 'done' whereas the Silicon Valley mindset should be that software dictates everything else and thus is in continuous state of evolution.
It’s unfortunate that new features that no one asked for and that degrade the user experience are added to releases with increased frequency ever year.
macOS, when it was called OS X, used to get released whenever it was released. It usually had some bugs and those would be worked on over the lifetime of the release. After Steve Jobs died, Tim Cook decided to switch it up to a yearly release schedule. That was self-imposed. Since then, Apple’s software quality has been steadily declining. They have no one to blame but themselves, yearly releases is not enough time to introduce new features and polish and fix bugs in old ones. And they keep adding more operating systems, making it hard on themselves when they have proved they can’t do it.
> I'm not sure it's so easy. I think you have to compromise on hardware or software and Apple makes a choice.
No one forces Apple to stick to yearly releases. No one forces Apple to cut down on QA. No one forces Apple to prioritize shiny new poorly designed and half-baked features over system stability.
In fact Apple gets its highest praise (from nerds like us) for OS releases that just fix bugs and improve performance. Of course shareholders praise other things like cutting costs and raising revenue.
Apple breaks stuff all the time. I sometimes wonder if they even have automated testing.
Airplay and everything around it is flaky AF. For me, when Tahoe came out Airplay stopped working for me for ~3 months. After it came back, Airplay continued to just decide to disconnect randomly for me, all the time. I'd extend my screen via my AppleTV, 2, 5, 10 minute later it would just suddenly disconnect.
A long standing bug, last night on Golden Gate, I extended to TV via Airplay. Then later turned it off. The dock disappeared and was in auto-hide mode (I don't use auto-hide mode). I go into setting and clearly auto-hide mode is off. Toggle in on and back off to fix. This bug has been there for 5+ years?
It has been speculated that Apple completely revamped how iOS deals with multiple screens in anticipation of the iPhone duo launch. Believe me, this change has been very disruptive to iOS developers too, specifically those who took the effort to support an external screen in their iOS app. Apple again steamrolled users relying on a feature Apple believes is little used and changed its behavior to suit its own hardware.
I've been building software to solve issues like this[1]. The question is always: why is it so hard to show what you want on the screen?
So I've built the system with a separate control and presentation. It connects to PowerPoint, Google slides, etc so you can present through web and control it anywhere.
I've also recently added tools to annotate slides just like described in TFA. It's still quite basic but if you're finding yourself in situations like OP, give it a try and let me know how it goes.
Apple Music has a dedicated button to add a song to favourites, which I use. When I plug my phone in my car I can then say “play my favourites” and it plays it.
Until I’ve upgraded to iOS 27 and after saying “play my favourites” the phone responds now with “playing FAMILY favourites” (no idea what that means) and plays some random songs.
Incredibly annoying, great example of trying to be too clever for its own good.
Ha! Guess there are multiple Apple Music regressions. Just upgraded to 27.0.1 on iPhone 13 Mini My regression is when playing local music in a playlist, if you try to manually seek when a song has less than 10 seconds left it jumps to the next song on the screen while the prior song continues uninterrupted and stays in a confused stuck state until the next song begins. Sometimes the counter for the next song begins while the last song is still finishing. Once the new song stats the counter "adjusts" itself and then we continue onwards.
I remember from an old CCC conference they talked about looking for vulns in specific portions of the OS that have had UX changes like this as it may indicate a lower skilled developer having to show that they are getting tickets done. Code that was solid ends up introducing bugs. Areas of the OS untouched have less likelihood of easy to find bugs. I don't know how valid that theory really is but your example makes me think I have to start wasting time monitoring the beta program to see what changed and if my most used app features are touched I wait until at least the .1 release or now probably .2 release. Problem is with the advent of AI assisted hacks, it feels like I should update the nanosecond something new comes out.
Window management on iPadOS is a mess. The old way (only one app, Split View or slide over) worked well, but is mostly gone since iOS 26. With iOS 27 the new window management became a bit better. But it's still pretty unusable without a mouse/pointing device. But even with a mouse it's not intuitive.
I use my iPad 99% without a keyboard and a mouse, and the window management only became worse over time. It got more features, sure, but it got very hard to use in a useful way.
So I'm back to the single app mode most of the time, which provides less functionality than 10 years ago.
Split View and Slide Over was useful. It used to be really easy to add an additional window/app next to the currently open app. But now it requires fiddling around with resizing windows and arranging them in the right way. Many more steps. I can now open more than 2 apps simultaneously, but more than 2 apps just don't fit the screen of an iPad.
PS: they brought back the option to just drag an app from the dock to enable Split View, but it's still not as smooth as it used to be before 26.
Stage manager and liquid glass were 2nbig flops. Stage manager because it’s unusable and adds clutter to the screen and liquid glass because it makes an m1 ipad pro feel like a 2010 device
stage manager is just a worse implementation of the old ‘auto hide other apps’ flag that has been broken for some time now. shame. i preffered that mode and it might have been the default on early builds on os x Steve jobs used it in his presentations.
I updated from iOS 18 a few days ago to 26 because Claude design needs newer web apis. I m shocked how bad the „windows“ experience is on iPads now. I had no idea.
I've found iPads to be fantastic presentation tools.
Having an ipad on a conference/convention booth is amazing - airplay my rotating content to a big screen, and when someone walks up I can grab the ipad to delve into details based on the conversation.
Early on (first gen ipad) I had a whole client team nickname me "the ipad guy" because I showed up and presented across a few ipad apps where I could pinch, zoom, and annotate live instead of showing a vanilla PPT file.
This might be the only use case in which a Windows tablet is a good option. I've seen some people using Windows tablets with a pen for presentations quite efficiently.
Windows has the benefit that it's still an open-ish OS. If something doesn't work as expected, it can be somehow hacked into the way you need it to be. I think Linux doesn't work well with touch devices and pen input, also the choice of presentation software is much more limited.
Fully disagree. iPadOS is too unstable, janky, immature, and prone to awkward half-baked changes to be used as a regular computer. I've tried for years. OP is correct - stay far away from iPadOS for computing. Use macOS.
Both the hardware and software market for tablets running a real desktop OS still seem pretty terrible, and it's been over 10 years since the release of the first Apple Pencil. No competition seems to be coming at all. Windows Surface exists, but software is still not great and the stylus not as good as Apple's.
They kinda already did for niche use-cases. When they introduced the orange/green activity indicators for camera or microphone, they broke some workflows for VJing as your stage visuals now got a persistent dot in the top-right.
I served on a jury recently. The lawyers used an iPad with special trial software to present evidence.
It worked fine. They won their judgment, the lawyers with the desktop PC setup lost the case.
I rented a car from Enterprise recently. They use iPads for everything since you are walking out to the cars. This is a giant company doing most of their business logic on iPads.
In my mind the “iPad isn’t a real computer” crowd are doing a sort of pearl clutching. Has your “real” computer never had a bug or regresssion?
I think the real "ipad isn't a real computer" thing is that you can do arbitrary stuff with the computer. I can have arbitrary programs open. I can write arbitrary programs. I can arrange them arbitrarily. I can open dozens of them and keep them open in memory. I can push my device to the limits of its resources if I want and it won't try and offload anything stupidly on me, it will do what I ask of it.
But you could always make an app to handle car rentals for ipad or iphone or whatever. You could make an app for lawyers doing documents. That was never the argument against "ipad isn't a computer." It doesn't expose the file system to you. More than anything, it tries to keep up the curtain between you, Dorothy, and the wizard, who is just a man after all. That is why it is not a real computer and will never be one fundamentally.
> Has your “real” computer never had a bug or regresssion?
Sure, but the question is how limited you are in what you can do about it. iDevices are incredibly locked down. On my laptop I would just use the package manager to downgrade a package until it is fixed, or restore a backup. Or you could just fix the code yourself (or ask an AI for help to do so these days).
Even Windows has system restore to roll back to a previous OS version iirc (though it has been many years since I used windows last, going to all Linux has been so good). Not sure if that is possible on an iPad? I know Android doesn't really let you downgrade either the OS or an individual app, I would assume it is similar on iOS.
Generally agree here. iPads have been this weird category of devices that have desktop class hardware, but the software is intentionally restricted. I posit Apple is confused about what to do with the iPad. It is the best selling tablet brand, but that doesn't mean much when you look at the absolute garbage the rest of the industry is putting out.
Anyway, a productive conversation this specific problem would be to borrow the solution from the Mac screen sharing UX. Pick which window(s) you want displayed on an external display. All other windows will only appear on the primary iPad screen. This is not a hard problem to solve.
> It is the best selling tablet brand, but that doesn't mean much when you look at the absolute garbage the rest of the industry is putting out.
That’s where I am.
I love my iPad, because I love the tablet form factor. I used an Android tablet for years prior to the iPad Pro releasing, and iPadOS is much better. I’ve played with Android tablets periodically since but they don’t seem to care about the form factor at all.
Just because it’s the best doesn’t mean it’s good, though. I don’t understand how they can justify selling a $300+ keyboard for a $1,700 device and never fix long-standing bugs with keyboard use, much less continue to add regressions in new releases that aren’t fixed.
It's not clear if the way it worked before was the way Apple intended or not. Usually the app in the foreground controls displays, which wasn't a problem on iPads until the definition of foreground changed. It could be that an app was /supposed/ to let go of external displays when leaving foreground, and not it's just enforced. Unfortunately, Apple gets to decide what is the correct behavior, not the user.
Good luck convincing anyone outside of HN types. I get regular requests from my wifeto assist with some task and my answer is “you can’t really do that on a phone or tablet, you need to use a real computer”. They are still not done.
It sounds like she’s asking you for help and you’re suggesting using a different tool rather than helping. If you keep repeating that it means she either doesn’t want to or has trouble doing it. Just take care of the tasks dude lol
I gave up on using an iPad for computer things about two years ago. Too many weird iOS limitations; no support for virtualization (despite their chips being virt-capable); multitasking still being awkward, especially with Stage Manager. It's not for lack of trying either; I gave it three goes before throwing the towel in.
On a somewhat related note, I'm afraid of upgrading to macOS 27 for similar "something I depend on is horribly broken now" reasons. There's always been this fear just after a new macOS release, but with how hard Apple is pushing Siri AI, I'm quite scared of what limitations they've imposed in servicing this goal.
This feature uses an iPad with USB-C. The USB-C is connected to a docking station with a monitor Or just directly to a monitor. The iPad does not allow multiple desktops. It does allow a single monitor but only to show a limited number of apps, namely apps that have second monitor output requirements and feature support.
My biggest pet peeve with Apple using USB-C is this very incompatibility. It made super duper sense to allow docking station capabilities. It would have been well within the capability of the CPU and GPU. And it would have been a killer feature. Possibly even killing the need for macbooks, but definitely killing the idea of laptops.
I also teach from an iPad, as do the majority of the teachers at my school. I don't think the issue is as simple as the article presents.
> Essentially, you had to swipe up as though going to the home screen, then tap on the app you wanted in the dock, and that app would take over the external display if it had a presentation mode. This was weird and hard to understand, but Apple’s solution is to just make it so that whatever is the most recently tapped app takes over, which is much, much worse.
Some apps, like PowerPoint and Google Slides, only enter "presenter mode" and take over the external AirPlay screen on explicit user action.
Other apps, like Notability, will automatically enter "presenter mode" and take over the external display if they detect a secondary display without explicit user action, even when it is not the only app on screen. You can then turn off this mode if you would like by going into the menus.
AirPlay calls itself "screen mirroring" in the Apple menus, and I can say with confidence from talking to the average teacher in the building that they expect it to mirror their screen. Well-behaved apps like PowerPoint that only take over the AirPlay session when prompted by the user will match the naïve user's expectations.
Apps like Notability that take over the entire AirPlay session without explicit interaction and without being the only app on screen break the naïve user's expectations of display mirroring. Multiple teachers have asked me why their calculator app (for example) does not show up on the Airplay display when they're using Notability.
> As for what the behavior should be, I’m not a developer, but here’s a proposal: if you’re using an app that is in presenter mode (e.g., PowerPoint playing a presentation, or a GoodNotes document open), it should always get precedence on the external display, until that presentation gets stopped, the document is closed, or the app is quit. Period.
I understand and even share the author's concerns, but I think the new compromise—only the active app can take over external displays—makes sense as a default because it matches the average user's expectations of AirPlay. The old method had major benefits and some annoyances, and in my opinion it should still be an option for a background app to control the external display if the user explicitly wants it or has enabled some toggle.
Apple did not handle the 26-27 transition well at all, and this really threw me the first time it came up. (I did not have the option to not update my employer's iPad, so I've been on 27 since release.) There should be a way to have a second app (secretly) open and focused while you present only from app #1, but I think the new default is better.
MacOS 26 Has lots of annoying and worse changes. At least there is a possibility to revert to 25 if the device ever supported it but phones and tablets are more trapped. My wife is having a miserable time with iMessages on ios26 they are not always hitting the phone and even after applecare fixes they revert to only hitting her laptop. I think Apple has peaked if they can't right their software ship. It will be a loss as they are more secure.
I’ve been bitten by these changes before and it left me feeling hoodwinked.
I used to be able to connect using a lightning-to-VGA/HDMI dongle, draw in an app like Goodnotes, and share+record that view. Sometime in 2018 or 19, they disabled this. The workflow I ended up figuring out involves connecting the iPad to a Mac via a lightning-to-usbc cable, starting a new movie (not screen recording!) through QuickTime, and selecting the iPad as a source. Then, you can share the view of the screen to an external display with acceptable latency and the ability to record the session. Be sure to select a mic, too, when you do this, otherwise the recording won’t have any audio. For some reason, it doesn’t start recording out of the default mic by default when selecting the iPad for the screen…
That’s a “iPad+adapter+OS” stack changed to “iPad+Mac+cable+QuickTime w/ tricky options” stack. If you’re one of the unfortunate souls owning a Mac w/o an HDMI port, throw an extra display adapter in there for Chaos’s sake.
It’s mind blowing how such a common workflow has become so obscured by arbitrary restrictions to OS functionality with no clear purpose.
Are you sure how you use an iPad with a third party app is a common work flow? Are you sure it wasn’t broken by that third party app not updating for a new iOS?
Am I the only one having ridiculous issues in MacOS 27? The window management is simply broken, whenever I click an app in the dock the OS switches to the completely wrong screen, and when I move a window to another screen I often have a black screen on the source screen.
It's almost unusable I can't believe it passed QA _and_ is still not fixed.
Mac user from May this year (maxed out mbp16, you can guess the use case). The dock sometimes doesn't want to unhide, the window manager sometimes thinks it's still there when trying to maximize something (not "fullscreen"), the taskbar (or whatever the thing at the top is called) sometimes blacks out completely when switching workspaces (clicking on it kinda fixes it - not sure if clicking _anywhere_ on it fixes it), still no shortcuts for stage manager, alt(cmd)-tab is still practically useless for me, workspace animations are still always there, etc, etc, etc.
Basically it's anything but "just works". It's still an extremely nice general purpose machine.
Oh, forgot. Spotlight takes over a second to autocomplete sometimes. Everything but apps is disabled from the settings menu for it, and I exclusively use it to launch (or bring back in focus, cause... "alt-tab") applications. Super annoying.
You're not the only one. I also regret upgrading, primarily because of the window management issues. I typically use 3-4 "spaces" and an external monitor and it's now a pathetically stupid nightmare, where windows almost never retain their last position correctly (which they used to do perfectly fine), and my keyboard shortcuts for spaces don't work until I run `killall Dock`, but I have to do this EVERY TIME MY MONITOR TURNS OFF or every time I change monitors. So freaking ridiculous and irritating. It's fucking 2026
Filed feedback referencing your code. Agree the presentation should keep the external display until it's explicitly stopped. Focus and output are two different things and this update merged them.
I hate stuff like this. Apple changed how the new Apple Watch buttons work, breaking massive muscle memory on how to get the app switcher. "Thankfully" my Apple Watch "ultra" from 4 years ago is basically considered obsolete so it won't get the update.
MacOS 27 has made adding an AirPlay display a chore, it's gone from the setting panel and now in the quick settings on the top right. Took me forever to figure that one out.
My iPad with a faster chip than my MacBook Pro can't do the most basic computer things even though the form factor is what I want from a modern computer.
At some point people are going to realize how crippled iPad OS is and will start switching to other platforms. It doesn't matter how powerful the processor is, the OS has always been the limitation. My M4 iPad Pro has a desktop grade processor but fucking useless for any real task even remotely related programming. It's just a glorified $1000 YouTube machine at this point because the OS pretty much doesn't allow you to do anything with it other than media consumption or basic media editing. The "Pro" moniker is just a joke.
I'd argue the account given in the blog post disagrees with what you're saying.
Up until recently the OS did exactly what the OP wanted:
> I rely heavily on writing on handouts from my iPad, projected via AirPlay to an external screen that my students can see. When I’m doing this, my iPad is also doing many other things: controlling a PowerPoint presentation on my Mac, showing me notes that I’ve taken on points I want to mention and students I want to call on, and showing me the results of polls before I reveal them to the class.
That's not a crippled OS. And he's using it professionally so "Pro" doesn't seem inappropriate. The way the author describes what they're doing, it's difficult to see a laptop replacing it.
So, using powerpoint related functions on a tablet is a problem solved in 2014. Are we still going to be using that as a justification to a pro label on a $1000+ device with a desktop grade processor?
Just this past weekend, just for fun and for recreational programming purposes, I tinkered with Termux on my Samsung S9 FE tablet until I got a full-fledged XFCE window environment running. It uses Termux:X11, which is a stand-alone APK that functions as an X server client, and the Termux app running an X server. So I can seamlessly use apps installed on the tablet as Android apps (such as Brave browser) with terminal sessions in Termux (essentially the "TTY" layer) and other in a full-fat terminal emulator within XFCE (in my case I really like Alacritty) to do web development (serving stuff to http://localhost:8000) or desktop graphics/game programming that's easily transferrable to my other machines because it's written in a portable scripting language like Lua and Love2D.
I got it all working the way I like over the course of a single weekend of not-particularly-focused or effortful hobby-grade tinkering.
And not a single part of this would even be possible if I was trying to do it on an iPad, despite the iPad having like 10x the compute power of my Android tablet.
Consider that your use case is relevant for an infinitesimally small percentage of Apple's user base. It would be an utter waste of time for them to cater to you, and it's a waste of your money to buy their products.
Very much agree with you, but I’m pretty surprised that you even bought the M4 given that all these limitations blocking the iPad from its potential have been there since the first iPad Pro first made the claim that it could be on par with a general purpose machine.
And especially given that the very cheapest iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard is not $1000 but $1,498 (and that’s with 256GB, which is a crippling size of storage for a device that you have any intentions of using for serious work - even on my phone I’m constantly regretting that storage choice).
Maybe you just have a lot more money than me though :D
I personally don't understand the point of an M4 iPad to begin with, let alone M4 Pro. What kind of CPU-intensive work can you do on an iPad? Video editing, I guess? You can't do any serious programming because there's no proper terminal emulator and you can't compile and run custom code. All you have are interpreted languages like Python and Ruby, but it seems like they still can't use the full power of an M4 because iPadOS doesn't let you spawn threads AFAIK.
Even for photo/video editing, why not use a Mac mini with the same (!) CPU and proper cooling? An iPad doesn't even have a fan, so surely the CPU will throttle.
"A glorified $1000 YouTube machine" is a pretty accurate description of an iPad LMAO
It certainly lets you spawn threads. What it doesn't let you do is spawn processes (which blocks what a typical IDE would like to do, as well as things like the Chrome sandboxing model)
This is the exact reason why the Apple Vision Pro is failing, because they put a toy OS on it instead of an actual operating system that is conducive for getting real work done.
if I could have macos on an ipad pro I'd stop using my macbook forever, it would be the perfect device, until then it's just a big phone, and since I replaced my iphone with a watch I don't need either pad or phone.
You realize there are a lot of "Pro" things that aren't programming. Yeah, it's a pretty bad choice for programming, so don't buy one for that. It's a fine choice for many other things. There's a whole world full of people who do different things. The iPad is not targeted as a work machine for the HN crowd.
The form factor is useful for a lot of application. My laptop/desktop is more powerful, but they are limited to places where I'm sitting down. There are a lot of jobs that are better done walking around. Trying to fix a machine - you want the computer with you. Trying to do a presentation - your presentation is better if you are not standing still.
What is serious computing? There are some things where I expect to have to be at my desk for hours to get them done and then a phone/tablet is worse. However there are also a lot of things better done when not at a desk and a laptop/desktop is worse.
Because you slapped a "Pro" label in your marketing and sold it as a capable device to begin with, going on over about how powerful it is. That is directly targeted towards a professional audience.
Apple hardware is underserved by software. iPad versions of the desktop applications are severely limited and I see no reason to upgrade my iPad Pro to the latest version, because I know all that computer power would be wasted.
This isn't just an Apple problem though. Even Samsung, Google / Qualcomm or Microsoft and Intel / AMD face the same business issue - hardware development has outpaced software development. Think about it - multiple core CPUs are essentially multiple CPUs packaged into one and Intel now offers 10+ core CPU for regular consumers. SSDs also give "outdated" hardware another lease of life. And as software companies find it more and more difficult to utilise completely the hardware powering them, they also face a dilemma of how to support hardware development by creating softwares that run "slower". This is best exemplified by the famous WinTel partnership between Microsoft and Intel, wherein every subsequent version of Windows required better hardware. Google Android too follows the same model. Today, including AI can slow down your computing. But it faces two major problem - 1) it clashes with the business model of AI companies that offer AI as a subscription service and 2) people can't afford the hardware to run AI (this is is why Windows 11 was forced to downgrade its minimum hardware requirement from 16gb to 8gb). (Also, the bottleneck of AI isn't computing power but memory throughput and bandwidth).
We've had GUI OSes and softwares running fine on 100Mhz CPUs once. One would think todays softwares would be blazing on the multi-core, multi-Ghz cpus, and multi-GB RAM and SSD hardwares. But the computing experience today still feels like the 90s experience (except for the increased stability, and less crashes).
Nobody wants to make software better because it isn't in their business interest to do so.
This reminds me of https://www.hyrumslaw.com/ ; users come to depend on any behavior of your program. I wonder if Apple had a sense of how much users depended on the old behavior; was it observable?
Another stupid quirk is USB-C HDMI output sometimes outputs 4:3 mirroring of the iPad screen even when in a full screen video. If you reconnect and fiddle with pausing/playing the content while screen locked, you can “trick” it to use presentation mode at the screens native resolution.
Half the problem is flagship apps like HBO/Netflix don’t implement this correctly.
Oh and this is all different if you have a keyboard attachment because only then are you allowed to “extend” display which can use the screen’s native resolution.
This is what happens when you do not own and control hardware you buy.
Keyword: buy, own, control
Any "autoupdating", or otherwise controlled device by the manufacturer is more an indefinite rental with horrific terms that basically amount to "lol screw you".
The device supports installing software, but only THEIR approved (cr)app store? Thats just a rental.
Device doesnt provide you root or administrator, but retains it for the company? Thats just a rental.
Features are sold one day, but an update removes them without your permission? Thats just a rental.
Cant revert an update that damaged your usability, cause the company prevents downgrades? Thats just a rental.
Thankfully, we already have laws on the books to cover this. There's plenty enough proof that these devices may be physically in the hands of someone who paid money to a retailer, and have proof of first sale. But it's demonstrable that these are indefinite rentals *masquerading* as sales. In other words, they are lying about a "sale". This should trigger Federal Trade Commission, under mass fraudulent rentals.
(And no, im looking at the capability and ownership of the whole device. Its obvious that a dumb device that just does the features its claimed to do is not a rental. But devices that have underlying inaccessible parts to the purchaser, BUT retain company control is the scope of this complaint. Nobody's arguing for a dumb coffee maker to have a web browser.)
in AI era, marginal cost of getting your 'anything' compatible with open systems and solutions is so low, that soon I expect only really stubborn, sad people still fighting with MacOS/Windows/PadOS
Define soon? I'd put a lot of money on the current crop of OS's still being dominant in 10 years. Most folks don't care enough to switch let alone "vibe" their own replacement software.
As much as I wish 2027 to be the year of Linux Desktop, I'm afraid the companies will just "up the ante" by making all the APIs and boundaries much more convoluted, with AI watchdogs and remote servers along the way.
Airplay from within an app used to be different than airplay the entire screen.
This was invaluable especially from the photo app, where sharing the entire screen shows everything.
Starting airplay from within the photo app puts it into a form of slideshow, where I can scroll all the photos and videos and select one, one at a time for it to appear on the screen instead.
It is a much better experience for viewers on the screen not seeing the entire device screen. If you switch to another app, what's on screen doesn't get affected.
Ever since Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Apple has, deliberately or not, been introducing regressions into its software. Is it more secure? Yes. But things are getting uglier and uglier (I’m looking at you, Ive), and many things are broken or slower.
Honestly you get what you deserve if you try to use an ipad as your main computer. There's no faith in Apple ever fixing iPadOS - it's why they are releasing a touch screen Mac (Which is what they should have done in 2010).
Yes, this guy’s whole life and workflow for teaching to a large class was based around his iPad having a basic feature. If you don’t lecture to students using an iPad, probably you do have different problems.
iPads are something you give to a kid to keep them entertained. You should not make any production system wholly dependent on a platform you don't have root access to without some sort of backup or egress plan.
They are a hardware company. They want you to have to buy two devices. One for showing the presentation, another for notes and any kind of accompanying support material that is only for the presenter to see.
So I could see the other argument here: I’m presenting from a presentation, I want to switch to a live demo environment, and to do so I need to turn off the presentation entirely?
Now, another operating system might see this tension and say: why not have a UI element come up, and ask the user whether they want to share their entire screen or stay on the existing shared window?
Here, I think this hits a fundamental weakness in Apple’s design culture: if you want to make things magical by removing options from users, occasionally you’re going to hit something that’s impossible to do without giving the user control. And if anything, Apple’s culture has been overtuned towards not providing that control, if at all possible.
Nobody wants complexity for complexity’s sake, but this is the type of thing that should have come up in a meeting, and someone didn’t feel empowered to bring it up.
It's a while since I used Airplay for anything other than Youtube videos, but here is how I thought it worked:
1. If I choose to Airplay from the control center, it mirrors the whole screen (or possibly also extends as a second screen). Whatever I open on the iPad (or drag to the second screen) is what the audience sees.
2. If I Airplay from inside an app with presentation mode, it works similar to Airplaying a video. That one app remains active even if I switch to another app.
3. To switch what gets presented, I simply start a new Airplay session: from control center if I want to switch to sharing the whole screen, or to another app if I want that app's presentation mode. This doesn't have to be automatic, but I shouldn't have to actively close the old session to start a new one.
4. To switch back to a previous presentation, I open that app back up and re-enable Airplay - there could be a button to "resume presentation".
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how that is too complicated. It seems rather intuitive that if I'm sharing a specific app window, I didn't mean to share the whole thing. (And it's also intuitive that if I actively start a new share, that takes over from the old one. No need to actively close the old share first.)
I think there’s a solution that fits within the Apple Design culture that they already use. If you’re connected to a display you can already click the “AirPlay” icon to change the audio output location. (Eg I’m connected to a display via usbc cable but want the audio to go to a Bluetooth device or headphones)
So, just let me select the app that gets the display output. And make “share screen” a discrete choice.
The "magic" here should be that whichever app was last explicitly cast to an external display should be the one that keeps casting to that display until the user chooses from a different app to cast it to the external display.
I think the counter-argument you posed is the weaker of the two. You of course know you want to switch to displaying the live demo environment instead of the presentation you chose to cast to the display, but there's no way the OS can reasonably infer that, so it shouldn't.
> Here, I think this hits a fundamental weakness in Apple’s design culture: if you want to make things magical by removing options from users, occasionally you’re going to hit something that’s impossible to do without giving the user control. And if anything, Apple’s culture has been overtuned towards not providing that control, if at all possible.
Sadly true.
> UI element come up, and ask the user whether they want to share their entire screen
Better yet, allow for a dock on the extended screen, that lists all apps that have feature support for another monitor. The dock will have an app to duplicate screen 1. However, Control of this dock will have to be done via mouse / trackpad, because touch is not available on second screen..
> I’m presenting from a presentation, I want to switch to a live demo environment, and to do so I need to turn off the presentation entirely?
While a bit annoying, that seems like the optimal solution within the constraints of apple's design culture.
>I’m presenting from a presentation, I want to switch to a live demo environment, and to do so I need to turn off the presentation entirely?
Ideally, a well-designed live demo app would also support presentation mode. Switching to it (e.g., via Alt-Tab or swiping) would automatically update the external display.
The external screen would act like a dedicated full-screen view for any app in presentation mode. If no app is in that mode, it would stay blank (not show the home screen) - unless the home screen itself has presentation mode enabled.
Anyone preparing a presentation should and do tend to set everything up and test it in advance. Apps that support presentation mode can keep control of the external display and let you switch between them smoothly, so all that preparation pays off.
Not a live demo app, a live demo environment for an app. Your suggestion would mean every app would use presentation mode, which makes the concept worthless.
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Probably simplest solution is to keep current behaviour and get a second iPad for notes.
Any self-respecting Apple user has at least three iPads.
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This reminds me of a response from a Microsoft MVP on a question about reducing storage usage by stale installer files in Windows folder:
"Essentially to reduce the space used you need to increase the size lf your storage"
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This must have been why they had so many extra PADDs in Star Trek. The only real way to multi-task!
I mean isn’t that how zoom and likes of it work?
You can either share a specific window (and need to switch off and share another if you want to share another app) or you can share entire screen.
If I understand correctly that’s what would be the solution here
> this is the type of thing that should have come up in a meeting, and someone didn’t feel empowered to bring it up
I was completely agreeing with you until this statement at the very end.
How do you know it didn't come up in a meeting and that Apple isn't full of assholes who channel their inner (wildly distorted perception of) Steve Jobs to shut down dissent? If there's any place where a whole goddamn committee could be that delusional about its own nature, it's Apple. The company got way too big for its own good a very long time ago.
You're spot on otherwise. It's the fundamental reason why everyone who does hates Apple.
The endless struggle of professional iPad users trying to get their hardware to act like something it insists it is not.
Ultimately the team behind it doesn't want to relinquish control to the user, so we're stuck in this world where it can never truly by a professional tool because every step of the way there is something like this where on a real computer its just an extra screen and you put on what you want on it and the situation where content of the other screen gets suddenly shown can't happen. But the iPad has to pretend screens don't exist and only apps do.
Sure but here we are talking about Airplay, not about a monitor directly connected to the iPad (which also can be done)
Great, just need to make sure I have a dongle and a 10' HDMI cable in my iPad bag.
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Airplay can just extend the screen as a second monitor on MacOS
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This might be true but also ipadOS is a buggy mess and fails to even be a good walled garden
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How is the top comment not, "And this is why hardware and software need to be more open?"
I know it's old complaints, but this place really should not be calling itself "hacker news."
Apple needs to get their software design on track again and do proper QA and testing on their software before making these kinds of changes. 27 was supposed to be a quality improvement snd bugfix release, but it's mostly been a cascade of bugs and UI failures.
Judging by what OP is describing this isn't a bug, it's a functionality change they thought was better. And they might even be right for the majority of users. But OP has a valid use case that's broken by the change.
Yea, the problem is Apple thought this was an UI improvement, but actually broke a common usage pattern. This kind of change should definitely be a setting, and considered thoroghly before changing the default. This is poor design and lack of QA, not a bug, per se. But the result is even worse because it means the previous functionality likely isn't coming back.
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There’s an XKCD for everything:
https://xkcd.com/1172/
Don’t go be being all reasonable, we’re trying to be Reddit here for a minute.
X.0 releases are always a mess at launch. Even everyone's beloved Snow Leopard had issues at launch, despite everyone remembering it as the perfect version of OSX.
https://www.rubenerd.au/the-myth-of-snow-leopard/
> This could be the first time I’ve ever downgraded an Apple OS.
> As we speak I’m downgrading the Snow Leopard partition on my trusty old Core Duo 2006 MacBook Pro back to Leopard (and while I’m at it, I’m finally getting around to upgrading the FreeBSD partition to 8.0!). I kept waiting for updates to fix the severe stability problems in the Finder, my FireWire 800 ExpressCard and my iMovie HD plugins, but I’ve decided to give up for now.
I know the OP was about iPadOS but same rules apply. Give the OS 27s a few minor version bumps and it'll stabilize. I'd argue OS 26's were worse at launch but they've gotten pretty stable in the last few updates (still ugly as sin on macOS though, Golden Gate is a huge improvement visually)
Gives me hope!
Apple marketing teams are brilliant and can figure out a “quality first” angle to help Ternus announce & defend a slowdown for Apple software teams.
In a paradigm of quality-focused releases every other year, what if they released the betas two years of their new-feature releases ahead of time? & superfunded QA & maybe even responded to every bug report (at least “acknowledged, thank you” & filling out the “Recent Similar Reports:” column). Could even the new-feature releases be just as low-defect as the quality-focused ones?
Slightly too extreme but… If they pretend software’s like their brand new iPhone hardware, that it needs a multi-billion-dollar recall if they make a big enough mistake, maybe that mindset would be a good balance (as I don’t feel hardware innovation’s been stifled by that reality, that it better be dang perfect).
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I remember 10.6.6 being the perfect version. At least, if you owned the 2010 MacPro. It was perfect as it was the last OS that was compatible with that hardware.
Ehhh, Even the .0 release of Snow Leopard was incredibly polished. I was there. It was still great.
It's not like now where they rush a yearly release and more than half the OS is nonfunctional until the .1 update several months later.
The point is to slow TF down on the OS updates. We never needed yearly releases. Going back to the pre-Lion model of OS upgrades is the way.
iOS 26 made clear that apple completely lost their UX advantage they had in the past. A lot of things were changed to "look better", while completely ignoring that it made UX worse. I think they just lost the people and the know-how to design good UX. Just making it look "pretty" is not good UX.
Exactly, they lost all the attention to detail, all the pursuit of clarity, all that was abandoned.
IMHO it's far less "pretty" than before too, in addition to just being an outright mess. And that's when it's working as intended.
There's still loads of obvious bugs in dark mode, where there's completely incompatible outlines and rounded rectangles with incompatible radii and overlapping elements that are clearly not intended.
That's on top of how the individual UX elements were mangled to fit into poor categorization schemes, with unnecessary complexity. Two things that bite me every single day are the completely overcomplicated screenshot interface that slows interaction by a great deal, and navigating to Safari history, which requires tapping a "Bookmarks" button.
And on macOS, the pointless visual noise of icons by menu items, that are each indecipherable, incoherent, and inconsistent between apps.. It's just unprofessional all around. I'm not surprised that the VP responsible left that same year, but there's been no fix, which is awful.
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That's because back then, they weren't releasing major new versions every year.
Snow Leopard had time to mature. These days with their yearly release cycles, the OS doesn't have time to mature anymore. Right when they get done fixing most of the problems, the next version comes out and everything is broken all over again. And they repeat this cycle year after year. It makes no sense.
Why do you think they need to do proper QA? People are going to buy their products anyway.
> People are going to buy their products anyway.
My iPhone 14 Pro 1TB finally broke down too much to remain usable a couple of weeks ago.
The screen shattered when the phone hit the floor. White and green lines on one side, making reading things more difficult and also straining on the eyes to look at at night. Since then, cracks in the screen cut my fingers ever ever so slightly on each touch. Not enough to make wounds, but enough to be discomfortable. I tried to use it still but over the next couple of days I dropped the phone on accident multiple times and now the touchscreen is not reacting as it should either. Some parts of the screen do not respond to touch at all, other parts still work, and others yet misregister where the touch is.
I investigated replacing the screen at third party phone shops. But it doesn’t make sense to pay to repair the screen. I was already living with a battery that was due to be replaced. And beyond that some hardware issue is preventing NFC from working since a year ago, so I can’t scan my passport NFC to renew my national bank id on it anyway either. Apple Pay doesn’t work, probably also because of the broken NFC. Finally, for whatever reason whenever I try to update iOS it fails saying it can’t verify the update after having downloaded it. Paying ~$200+ to replace the screen and battery and still having these other issues (NFC broken, and stuck on an older iOS version than it should) just wouldn’t be worth it.
I’ve been thinking long and hard about what phone to buy next for quite a while. And now that the screen broke and I was forced to make a decision I decided to not buy the latest greatest iPhone 18 Pro.
Because I am not as happy with Apple the company and their actions as I used to be.
I don’t want Android either however.
I ended up buying an iPhone 15 Pro 1TB second hand with good battery health. It gets me USB-C so that’s a plus compared to the 14 Pro I had.
All that is to say, no it’s not a given that we will keep buying new hardware from Apple directly anymore even if we did in the past used to buy our stuff new from them when time came to replace our old Apple devices. Of course even buying second hand is still supporting Apple indirectly to some degree. Because the people that do buy new from them know that a couple years later the amount they can sell that device for second hand to someone else is still pretty ok, relatively speaking.
Does Apple even have QA anymore? Do they even do user testing? I know a lot of people who have left Apple testing and validation in the past few years and every new macos and ios release is buggier than before. Insanely basic stuff where anyone actually using the app for a few days would have caught glaring UI and usability problems. I haven't worked there, but what I can see with my own two eyes makes me assume they've automated the hell out of usability testing. Maybe software is only being tested by other software. Maybe developers are the only people testing their own features. Many of the bugs I'm seeing today are iphone4 bad. How did no one ever pick up the phone and hold it in their damn hand? And on top of that, it certainly seems like they're hyper-focused on new features and are utterly ignoring foundational systems that everything runs on. Preview, Mail, and Finder are going down the tubes fast. I intentionally don't update my personal macbook because I see so many bugs in each new release on my work macbook.
It could be that they're doing what Microsoft did 10 years ago, they fired all their QA teams and replaced them with automatic tests and telemetry. It's part of the reason Windows breaks so much these days.
I'm sure they saved a ton of money though.
> [iPhone 4] How did no one ever pick up the phone and hold it in their damn hand?
That's well documented, all their field testing models were disguised as iPhone 3Gs with a rubber case around them. Gizmodo got their hands on one from a drunk engineer who left it in a bar.
So they didn't actually touch it with their bare hands ever, outside of the office at least.
"Ain't gonna buy no more no more, ain't gonna buy no more. How in the heck can I spike my debt if I ain't gonna buy no more?"
Capital won't like what comes next.
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I had heard 27 was much better than 26, so I broke my usual embargo on new macOS versions until x.y.5 and upgraded. I also had a problem with the 26.6.7(?) update that came out the same day as 27.0, so I went for it. Big mistake. I regret it. I also regret updating my homepods and ATV to 27.0. I had lots of phantom clicks on the tv remote. Turns out it was the homepods. When it happens I have to restart them to fix it. Never again. I will be on 27.x.y until 28.6 is released.
The thing is, despite the damage since 18 not being fully undone, 27 gets comparative praise because of 26's disaster lowering the bar.
I am sadly not seeing a recovery trend, they get less trigger happy with big changes but the lowered attention to detail and QA is still present. Maybe it takes time to turn the ship, hopefully they'll get there. I moved to linux though.
yeah, for the first two days it was great since it was much less sluggish than Tahoe. but window management is fucked. the menu bar just disappears randomly. the window controls on a fullscreen window don't render (thankfully you can still click them). if you click too fast in mission control it just goes all black.
yesterday i plugged in an extra monitor and found another bug. enable mission control, both screens show the windows, clicking on a window on the main screen focuses that window. clicking on a window on the secondary screen however doesn't focus it, it just passes the click right into the window as if mission control wasn't on.
If it’s any consolation, I typically do the same timing on my device updates. Still on Sequoia and 26.6.x and was considering upgrading earlier than usual. I will stick to the delayed cadence.
I just updated my iPad to 27 the other day and it's incredible how much of it is simply broken now. Luckily I haven't updated anything else yet (and now I don't plan to).
also stupidly updated and mission control and window management is so crazy buggy, adopting your embargo from now on if I can keep my sanity
I upgraded my MacBook pro and iPad just for the touchscreen experience when I'm extending my screen to the iPad. Big mistake. I was on Sequoia until then which was incredibly stable. I don't have the time and energy to fresh install sequoia, so I guess I'll just keep using it until Apple fixes 27 or until my patience runs out and I do a clean install of Sequoia
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I see comments on posts like this complaining that Apple has the money to make software as high-quality as their hardware so they must be dysfunctional.
I'm not sure it's so easy. I think you have to compromise on hardware or software and Apple makes a choice.
My whole career in embedded devices, software is always under schedule pressure from hardware. Not because hardware is sloppy or evil, but because doing new things is hard and hardware has deadlines that software doesn't.
Like, I think the lessons are that all the money in the world still can't buy you time and even Apple can't keep a lid on feature creep.
It was an existing software feature who's behavior was broken in an update, not a bug to do with integrating new hardware or something. There are always difficulties but I'm not sure how to connect this to a time crunch from new hardware delivery.
I bet xOS at this point is just a sloppy mess. The way they software lock certain features alone is probably cause of a bunch of slop.
> My whole career in embedded devices, software is always under schedule pressure from hardware. Not because hardware is sloppy or evil, but because doing new things is hard and hardware has deadlines that software doesn't.
The problem is the internet made post-release patches practical, which made software deadlines more flexible, which then allows management to choose a cheaper and less rigorous QA process.
Hardware is kinda like software in 1994 (just read about console game QA from the 80s/90s): you can't realistically patch defects after release, so you can't be sloppy.
It's an illustration of why technological constraints aren't all bad, and "progress" can cause regressions.
On the other hand, post-release patches made very complex software practical. And very complex software takes a very long time to test and people want the new stuff now.
There is no easy or even single "correct" answer. Just trade-offs.
There's a pretty big difference between embedded devices and high-end, general-purpose devices. Apple is very much the latter. Outside specific areas (like cell signal/etc) they are not constrained by hardware to the point that it inevitably impacts software quality—and the complaints people have are not about the parts of the software that are constrained! As far as I know, everybody is actually totally happy with Apple's wireless stack, power management and so on.
Now, is it possible that Apple's software issues are proximally caused by production pressure? Absolutely. That's almost definitely a major contributor. But the production pressure is not inherent to their device business; it's a choice the organization, collectively, makes.
Let’s not beat around the bush. Whoever made this decision in Apple seems pretty close to flat out evil.
There must be at least tens of thousands of ipad users globally (on ipads capable of upgrading to 27) who would would find this a critical loss.
To not mention this at all, not even in fine print release notes, while pushing people to upgrade knowing they cant ever downgrade back in the future, is just sabotage one step removed.
Especially as they did not offer any alternative way to access the functionality.
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Yes. Apple is a behemoth, heavy with layers and layers of middle management. It's pretty difficult to steer it any new direction and have everyone on board.
Apple's org chart now resembles Microsoft's org chart from this classic meme, but with far more groups: https://www.businessinsider.com/big-tech-org-charts-2011-6
I think it would need a big restructuring with strong, smart product leadership. I'm dubious they have that now, despite the image Apple PR is orchestrating in the press with Ternus as the new CEO.
Having worked at Microsoft at the time that comic was made, you need to understand that it also had more groups and it was fractal, zoom in and there are guns everywhere. Microsoft created a system where every silo was in competition with every other silo. As an example, I viewed this from the sidelines, during this time there was MS Messenger and MSN messenger which both supposedly worked together with the same backend except it didn't because whenever MSN wanted to add a fun feature they had their hand slapped by the MS Messenger team and visa versa. It was a shitty experience and I'm glad I left.
> because doing new things is hard and hardware has deadlines that software doesn't.
It was nothing new tho. They broke existing software. This is caught by basic software regression test. That's engineering 101.
Seems to me like it was an explicit design decision that fixed some use cases and broke others, rather than a regression in the sense of "A bug we introduced but didn't catch." As such a regression test wouldn't have caught this.
Someone made a design decision that broke some use cases.
When you're a gatekeeper / the phone company like Apple, the expectation is that as a general purpose device, you will adhere to at least some level of quality... simply because users have no alternative.
By constantly enforcing their walled garden and making it harder to use alternatives, Apple assumes the responsibility for the quality of their software. If they can't deliver, they should make it easy to pick and choose alternatives.
Somehow Garmin is even worse than Apple in that regard. Their mobile device hardware is (generally) quite good: robust and reliable with lots of little touches that serious athletes appreciate. But somehow they just can't get their act together on the software quality side. Everyone knows not to buy a new device at launch because it will suffer from frequent software glitches and crashes which take them at least a few months to fix. And even then, new releases frequently have regression defects that break existing features. Whether this is a deliberate choice or just general incompetence I have no idea.
I don't like the "deliberate choice or general incompetence" framing. It just isn't useful. What's both more likely and more interesting is to speculate on the specific mechanisms and forces that might lead to this sort of situation.
For example, perhaps the knowledge that firmware updates are possible for modern consumer devices means that the software teams have a higher risk tolerance when it comes to feature creep. They've been able to fix bugs in the past, and it was no big deal. It certainly wouldn't involve scrapping existing inventory or retooling anything in the production line like you might have to for a hardware defect.
Or, and this reflects my own experience as a software person, perhaps broader changes in software development culture are partially to blame. 15 years ago one of the first lines of defense for the team I was on was the project manager. As the one person whose only job was keeping a more holistic eye on the value chain, she often caught latent quality risks (e.g., the potential for two different in-development features to adversely interact) long before anything made it to QA. Nowadays most companies, in a lovely iteration of the doorman fallacy, have nixed that role because they believe Jira can do the job.
I've got similar feelings about Scrum. I have been on Scrum teams that were great at delivering consistently high quality software. But they were the exception. The more common situation is people rushing to merge a glut of changes on days n and n-1 of an n day sprint, every n days, forever. Which, regardless of what any manager says, is how they're de facto expected to behave. Taking two or three more days to get the job done properly would screw up the metrics on some KPI dashboard.
It's only a compromise on profit levels.
No one makes Apple release new products. There is a choice about the balance of releasing something and the quality of that release. Blaming that choice on anything but the people making it is nonsense.
> No one makes Apple release new products.
Their shareholders sure do.
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>No one makes Apple release new products.
Or buy them. Sign me: Vision Pro owner
I don’t know. Embedded software makes things way harder on itself than is necessary by tying itself to the comparative Stone Age in terms of language, tooling, and methodology. At least in the automotive & robotics world I interact with. I can’t believe how much time is unnecessarily pissed down a hole because everyone is just stuck doing the thing they know how to cobble together today instead of reforming what they do and how they do it.
Zero hardware changes forced springboard teams hand here.
>all the money in the world still can't buy you time
The people who actually get the money being made are the ones who want more money asap. They are the ones who set the (often unrealistic) timelines so that they can line their pockets sooner. After all, those yacht payments are coming due.
I've been told that software is treated as a BOM cost in embedded with a fixed cost and it being 'done' whereas the Silicon Valley mindset should be that software dictates everything else and thus is in continuous state of evolution.
Re: feature creep.
I wonder if Apple simply has too many employees?
It’s unfortunate that new features that no one asked for and that degrade the user experience are added to releases with increased frequency ever year.
macOS, when it was called OS X, used to get released whenever it was released. It usually had some bugs and those would be worked on over the lifetime of the release. After Steve Jobs died, Tim Cook decided to switch it up to a yearly release schedule. That was self-imposed. Since then, Apple’s software quality has been steadily declining. They have no one to blame but themselves, yearly releases is not enough time to introduce new features and polish and fix bugs in old ones. And they keep adding more operating systems, making it hard on themselves when they have proved they can’t do it.
> I'm not sure it's so easy. I think you have to compromise on hardware or software and Apple makes a choice.
No one forces Apple to stick to yearly releases. No one forces Apple to cut down on QA. No one forces Apple to prioritize shiny new poorly designed and half-baked features over system stability.
In fact Apple gets its highest praise (from nerds like us) for OS releases that just fix bugs and improve performance. Of course shareholders praise other things like cutting costs and raising revenue.
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Their customers do.
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> I think you have to compromise on hardware or software and Apple makes a choice.
Why do you think that? With unlimited talent and money on either side it seems possible to do both really well without it hurting profit margin.
Unlimited money in the definition of hurting profit margin - or are you will to pay unlimited prices for your next phone?
to me ipad is nothing but expensive toy. Using it for productivity is just plain stupid and won't work.
Apple breaks stuff all the time. I sometimes wonder if they even have automated testing.
Airplay and everything around it is flaky AF. For me, when Tahoe came out Airplay stopped working for me for ~3 months. After it came back, Airplay continued to just decide to disconnect randomly for me, all the time. I'd extend my screen via my AppleTV, 2, 5, 10 minute later it would just suddenly disconnect.
A long standing bug, last night on Golden Gate, I extended to TV via Airplay. Then later turned it off. The dock disappeared and was in auto-hide mode (I don't use auto-hide mode). I go into setting and clearly auto-hide mode is off. Toggle in on and back off to fix. This bug has been there for 5+ years?
It has been speculated that Apple completely revamped how iOS deals with multiple screens in anticipation of the iPhone duo launch. Believe me, this change has been very disruptive to iOS developers too, specifically those who took the effort to support an external screen in their iOS app. Apple again steamrolled users relying on a feature Apple believes is little used and changed its behavior to suit its own hardware.
What is your app and how did this affect it?
I've been building software to solve issues like this[1]. The question is always: why is it so hard to show what you want on the screen?
So I've built the system with a separate control and presentation. It connects to PowerPoint, Google slides, etc so you can present through web and control it anywhere.
I've also recently added tools to annotate slides just like described in TFA. It's still quite basic but if you're finding yourself in situations like OP, give it a try and let me know how it goes.
[1] theopenpresenter.com
Apple Music has a dedicated button to add a song to favourites, which I use. When I plug my phone in my car I can then say “play my favourites” and it plays it. Until I’ve upgraded to iOS 27 and after saying “play my favourites” the phone responds now with “playing FAMILY favourites” (no idea what that means) and plays some random songs. Incredibly annoying, great example of trying to be too clever for its own good.
Ha! Guess there are multiple Apple Music regressions. Just upgraded to 27.0.1 on iPhone 13 Mini My regression is when playing local music in a playlist, if you try to manually seek when a song has less than 10 seconds left it jumps to the next song on the screen while the prior song continues uninterrupted and stays in a confused stuck state until the next song begins. Sometimes the counter for the next song begins while the last song is still finishing. Once the new song stats the counter "adjusts" itself and then we continue onwards.
I remember from an old CCC conference they talked about looking for vulns in specific portions of the OS that have had UX changes like this as it may indicate a lower skilled developer having to show that they are getting tickets done. Code that was solid ends up introducing bugs. Areas of the OS untouched have less likelihood of easy to find bugs. I don't know how valid that theory really is but your example makes me think I have to start wasting time monitoring the beta program to see what changed and if my most used app features are touched I wait until at least the .1 release or now probably .2 release. Problem is with the advent of AI assisted hacks, it feels like I should update the nanosecond something new comes out.
Window management on iPadOS is a mess. The old way (only one app, Split View or slide over) worked well, but is mostly gone since iOS 26. With iOS 27 the new window management became a bit better. But it's still pretty unusable without a mouse/pointing device. But even with a mouse it's not intuitive.
I use my iPad 99% without a keyboard and a mouse, and the window management only became worse over time. It got more features, sure, but it got very hard to use in a useful way.
So I'm back to the single app mode most of the time, which provides less functionality than 10 years ago.
I never found a use for anything but single app mode on my iPad Pro.
Split View and Slide Over was useful. It used to be really easy to add an additional window/app next to the currently open app. But now it requires fiddling around with resizing windows and arranging them in the right way. Many more steps. I can now open more than 2 apps simultaneously, but more than 2 apps just don't fit the screen of an iPad.
PS: they brought back the option to just drag an app from the dock to enable Split View, but it's still not as smooth as it used to be before 26.
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Stage manager and liquid glass were 2nbig flops. Stage manager because it’s unusable and adds clutter to the screen and liquid glass because it makes an m1 ipad pro feel like a 2010 device
I have no idea what stage manager is and I don’t wanna look it up. And I have an iPad. But it’s also running the older ios
Don’t upgrade. Stay as long as you can.
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> I have no idea what stage manager is and I don’t wanna look it up.
It’s just yet another way to manage windows. It’s fully optional, I never even remember it exists. It was introduced in iPadOS 16 / macOS 13.
https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/ipad1240f36f/
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/mchl534ba392/
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stage manager is just a worse implementation of the old ‘auto hide other apps’ flag that has been broken for some time now. shame. i preffered that mode and it might have been the default on early builds on os x Steve jobs used it in his presentations.
Yeah it feels like a subpar android device.
I updated from iOS 18 a few days ago to 26 because Claude design needs newer web apis. I m shocked how bad the „windows“ experience is on iPads now. I had no idea.
An important lesson for anyone who believes it makes sense to use an iPad instead of a computer. (for any task)
This is a myopic take.
I've found iPads to be fantastic presentation tools.
Having an ipad on a conference/convention booth is amazing - airplay my rotating content to a big screen, and when someone walks up I can grab the ipad to delve into details based on the conversation.
Early on (first gen ipad) I had a whole client team nickname me "the ipad guy" because I showed up and presented across a few ipad apps where I could pinch, zoom, and annotate live instead of showing a vanilla PPT file.
This might be the only use case in which a Windows tablet is a good option. I've seen some people using Windows tablets with a pen for presentations quite efficiently.
Windows has the benefit that it's still an open-ish OS. If something doesn't work as expected, it can be somehow hacked into the way you need it to be. I think Linux doesn't work well with touch devices and pen input, also the choice of presentation software is much more limited.
Which apps do you use for this? Keynote or something else?
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Fully disagree. iPadOS is too unstable, janky, immature, and prone to awkward half-baked changes to be used as a regular computer. I've tried for years. OP is correct - stay far away from iPadOS for computing. Use macOS.
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Well, the author needs it to be a tablet form factor with a stylus as described here https://teddysvoronos.com/2015-11-19-in-praise-of-goodnotes/
Both the hardware and software market for tablets running a real desktop OS still seem pretty terrible, and it's been over 10 years since the release of the first Apple Pencil. No competition seems to be coming at all. Windows Surface exists, but software is still not great and the stylus not as good as Apple's.
I’m sure Apple could as easily break presentation mode on macOS.
They kinda already did for niche use-cases. When they introduced the orange/green activity indicators for camera or microphone, they broke some workflows for VJing as your stage visuals now got a persistent dot in the top-right.
But it'd be far easier for me to fix it, even if I had to disable SyStEm iNtEgRiTy PrOtEcTiOn to do it.
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A lot of teachers at my uni use them for drawing on the slides during lecture
Why? It would be helpful to understand why you support such a silly statement.
Why not play it even safer with an overhead projector?
With an unreliable bulb? Please. Poster board is where it's at.
What’s a computer?
I served on a jury recently. The lawyers used an iPad with special trial software to present evidence.
It worked fine. They won their judgment, the lawyers with the desktop PC setup lost the case.
I rented a car from Enterprise recently. They use iPads for everything since you are walking out to the cars. This is a giant company doing most of their business logic on iPads.
In my mind the “iPad isn’t a real computer” crowd are doing a sort of pearl clutching. Has your “real” computer never had a bug or regresssion?
I think the real "ipad isn't a real computer" thing is that you can do arbitrary stuff with the computer. I can have arbitrary programs open. I can write arbitrary programs. I can arrange them arbitrarily. I can open dozens of them and keep them open in memory. I can push my device to the limits of its resources if I want and it won't try and offload anything stupidly on me, it will do what I ask of it.
But you could always make an app to handle car rentals for ipad or iphone or whatever. You could make an app for lawyers doing documents. That was never the argument against "ipad isn't a computer." It doesn't expose the file system to you. More than anything, it tries to keep up the curtain between you, Dorothy, and the wizard, who is just a man after all. That is why it is not a real computer and will never be one fundamentally.
Perhaps "real computer" means being able to perform general purpose tasks. I don't think iPads are capable of that with how locked down they are.
I do believe them to be computers that excel in specialized settings. Like in your two examples.
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> Has your “real” computer never had a bug or regresssion?
Sure, but the question is how limited you are in what you can do about it. iDevices are incredibly locked down. On my laptop I would just use the package manager to downgrade a package until it is fixed, or restore a backup. Or you could just fix the code yourself (or ask an AI for help to do so these days).
Even Windows has system restore to roll back to a previous OS version iirc (though it has been many years since I used windows last, going to all Linux has been so good). Not sure if that is possible on an iPad? I know Android doesn't really let you downgrade either the OS or an individual app, I would assume it is similar on iOS.
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Generally agree here. iPads have been this weird category of devices that have desktop class hardware, but the software is intentionally restricted. I posit Apple is confused about what to do with the iPad. It is the best selling tablet brand, but that doesn't mean much when you look at the absolute garbage the rest of the industry is putting out.
Anyway, a productive conversation this specific problem would be to borrow the solution from the Mac screen sharing UX. Pick which window(s) you want displayed on an external display. All other windows will only appear on the primary iPad screen. This is not a hard problem to solve.
> It is the best selling tablet brand, but that doesn't mean much when you look at the absolute garbage the rest of the industry is putting out.
That’s where I am.
I love my iPad, because I love the tablet form factor. I used an Android tablet for years prior to the iPad Pro releasing, and iPadOS is much better. I’ve played with Android tablets periodically since but they don’t seem to care about the form factor at all.
Just because it’s the best doesn’t mean it’s good, though. I don’t understand how they can justify selling a $300+ keyboard for a $1,700 device and never fix long-standing bugs with keyboard use, much less continue to add regressions in new releases that aren’t fixed.
I mean, the real lesson is to not trust Apple. I can do the very basic things the OP article is describing on my phone, let alone a tablet.
This is a completely absurd take. The entire point of TFA is that it used to work fantastically well until iOS 27 broke it.
It's not clear if the way it worked before was the way Apple intended or not. Usually the app in the foreground controls displays, which wasn't a problem on iPads until the definition of foreground changed. It could be that an app was /supposed/ to let go of external displays when leaving foreground, and not it's just enforced. Unfortunately, Apple gets to decide what is the correct behavior, not the user.
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Good luck convincing anyone outside of HN types. I get regular requests from my wifeto assist with some task and my answer is “you can’t really do that on a phone or tablet, you need to use a real computer”. They are still not done.
It sounds like she’s asking you for help and you’re suggesting using a different tool rather than helping. If you keep repeating that it means she either doesn’t want to or has trouble doing it. Just take care of the tasks dude lol
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That is unfortunate.
I gave up on using an iPad for computer things about two years ago. Too many weird iOS limitations; no support for virtualization (despite their chips being virt-capable); multitasking still being awkward, especially with Stage Manager. It's not for lack of trying either; I gave it three goes before throwing the towel in.
On a somewhat related note, I'm afraid of upgrading to macOS 27 for similar "something I depend on is horribly broken now" reasons. There's always been this fear just after a new macOS release, but with how hard Apple is pushing Siri AI, I'm quite scared of what limitations they've imposed in servicing this goal.
This feature uses an iPad with USB-C. The USB-C is connected to a docking station with a monitor Or just directly to a monitor. The iPad does not allow multiple desktops. It does allow a single monitor but only to show a limited number of apps, namely apps that have second monitor output requirements and feature support.
My biggest pet peeve with Apple using USB-C is this very incompatibility. It made super duper sense to allow docking station capabilities. It would have been well within the capability of the CPU and GPU. And it would have been a killer feature. Possibly even killing the need for macbooks, but definitely killing the idea of laptops.
I also teach from an iPad, as do the majority of the teachers at my school. I don't think the issue is as simple as the article presents.
> Essentially, you had to swipe up as though going to the home screen, then tap on the app you wanted in the dock, and that app would take over the external display if it had a presentation mode. This was weird and hard to understand, but Apple’s solution is to just make it so that whatever is the most recently tapped app takes over, which is much, much worse.
Some apps, like PowerPoint and Google Slides, only enter "presenter mode" and take over the external AirPlay screen on explicit user action.
Other apps, like Notability, will automatically enter "presenter mode" and take over the external display if they detect a secondary display without explicit user action, even when it is not the only app on screen. You can then turn off this mode if you would like by going into the menus.
AirPlay calls itself "screen mirroring" in the Apple menus, and I can say with confidence from talking to the average teacher in the building that they expect it to mirror their screen. Well-behaved apps like PowerPoint that only take over the AirPlay session when prompted by the user will match the naïve user's expectations.
Apps like Notability that take over the entire AirPlay session without explicit interaction and without being the only app on screen break the naïve user's expectations of display mirroring. Multiple teachers have asked me why their calculator app (for example) does not show up on the Airplay display when they're using Notability.
> As for what the behavior should be, I’m not a developer, but here’s a proposal: if you’re using an app that is in presenter mode (e.g., PowerPoint playing a presentation, or a GoodNotes document open), it should always get precedence on the external display, until that presentation gets stopped, the document is closed, or the app is quit. Period.
I understand and even share the author's concerns, but I think the new compromise—only the active app can take over external displays—makes sense as a default because it matches the average user's expectations of AirPlay. The old method had major benefits and some annoyances, and in my opinion it should still be an option for a background app to control the external display if the user explicitly wants it or has enabled some toggle.
Apple did not handle the 26-27 transition well at all, and this really threw me the first time it came up. (I did not have the option to not update my employer's iPad, so I've been on 27 since release.) There should be a way to have a second app (secretly) open and focused while you present only from app #1, but I think the new default is better.
MacOS 26 Has lots of annoying and worse changes. At least there is a possibility to revert to 25 if the device ever supported it but phones and tablets are more trapped. My wife is having a miserable time with iMessages on ios26 they are not always hitting the phone and even after applecare fixes they revert to only hitting her laptop. I think Apple has peaked if they can't right their software ship. It will be a loss as they are more secure.
millions of settings to wade through, but no real control over anything.
Those millions of settings give some users a pleasurable but false sense of control.
I’ve been bitten by these changes before and it left me feeling hoodwinked.
I used to be able to connect using a lightning-to-VGA/HDMI dongle, draw in an app like Goodnotes, and share+record that view. Sometime in 2018 or 19, they disabled this. The workflow I ended up figuring out involves connecting the iPad to a Mac via a lightning-to-usbc cable, starting a new movie (not screen recording!) through QuickTime, and selecting the iPad as a source. Then, you can share the view of the screen to an external display with acceptable latency and the ability to record the session. Be sure to select a mic, too, when you do this, otherwise the recording won’t have any audio. For some reason, it doesn’t start recording out of the default mic by default when selecting the iPad for the screen…
That’s a “iPad+adapter+OS” stack changed to “iPad+Mac+cable+QuickTime w/ tricky options” stack. If you’re one of the unfortunate souls owning a Mac w/o an HDMI port, throw an extra display adapter in there for Chaos’s sake.
It’s mind blowing how such a common workflow has become so obscured by arbitrary restrictions to OS functionality with no clear purpose.
Are you sure how you use an iPad with a third party app is a common work flow? Are you sure it wasn’t broken by that third party app not updating for a new iOS?
See apps like Reflector.
Or you can use Zoom or likes of it and connect to it from ipad and share screen.
That actually has lower latency than quicktime thing you mentioned
Zoom also has terrible framerate and bitrates.
In Android world scrcpy utility exists to just run and mirror device screen in a window.
Am I the only one having ridiculous issues in MacOS 27? The window management is simply broken, whenever I click an app in the dock the OS switches to the completely wrong screen, and when I move a window to another screen I often have a black screen on the source screen.
It's almost unusable I can't believe it passed QA _and_ is still not fixed.
Mac user from May this year (maxed out mbp16, you can guess the use case). The dock sometimes doesn't want to unhide, the window manager sometimes thinks it's still there when trying to maximize something (not "fullscreen"), the taskbar (or whatever the thing at the top is called) sometimes blacks out completely when switching workspaces (clicking on it kinda fixes it - not sure if clicking _anywhere_ on it fixes it), still no shortcuts for stage manager, alt(cmd)-tab is still practically useless for me, workspace animations are still always there, etc, etc, etc.
Basically it's anything but "just works". It's still an extremely nice general purpose machine.
Oh, forgot. Spotlight takes over a second to autocomplete sometimes. Everything but apps is disabled from the settings menu for it, and I exclusively use it to launch (or bring back in focus, cause... "alt-tab") applications. Super annoying.
No, we are all on the same boat. 27.2 is a bit better, but introduced some new bugs too. In the end they fix one bug and introduce two new ones.
I honestly haven't seen any behavior like this. I use two external monitors and use different spaces heavily.
You're not the only one. I also regret upgrading, primarily because of the window management issues. I typically use 3-4 "spaces" and an external monitor and it's now a pathetically stupid nightmare, where windows almost never retain their last position correctly (which they used to do perfectly fine), and my keyboard shortcuts for spaces don't work until I run `killall Dock`, but I have to do this EVERY TIME MY MONITOR TURNS OFF or every time I change monitors. So freaking ridiculous and irritating. It's fucking 2026
Filed feedback referencing your code. Agree the presentation should keep the external display until it's explicitly stopped. Focus and output are two different things and this update merged them.
I hate stuff like this. Apple changed how the new Apple Watch buttons work, breaking massive muscle memory on how to get the app switcher. "Thankfully" my Apple Watch "ultra" from 4 years ago is basically considered obsolete so it won't get the update.
MacOS 27 has made adding an AirPlay display a chore, it's gone from the setting panel and now in the quick settings on the top right. Took me forever to figure that one out.
My iPad with a faster chip than my MacBook Pro can't do the most basic computer things even though the form factor is what I want from a modern computer.
At some point people are going to realize how crippled iPad OS is and will start switching to other platforms. It doesn't matter how powerful the processor is, the OS has always been the limitation. My M4 iPad Pro has a desktop grade processor but fucking useless for any real task even remotely related programming. It's just a glorified $1000 YouTube machine at this point because the OS pretty much doesn't allow you to do anything with it other than media consumption or basic media editing. The "Pro" moniker is just a joke.
I'd argue the account given in the blog post disagrees with what you're saying. Up until recently the OS did exactly what the OP wanted:
> I rely heavily on writing on handouts from my iPad, projected via AirPlay to an external screen that my students can see. When I’m doing this, my iPad is also doing many other things: controlling a PowerPoint presentation on my Mac, showing me notes that I’ve taken on points I want to mention and students I want to call on, and showing me the results of polls before I reveal them to the class.
That's not a crippled OS. And he's using it professionally so "Pro" doesn't seem inappropriate. The way the author describes what they're doing, it's difficult to see a laptop replacing it.
So, using powerpoint related functions on a tablet is a problem solved in 2014. Are we still going to be using that as a justification to a pro label on a $1000+ device with a desktop grade processor?
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Hard agree.
Just this past weekend, just for fun and for recreational programming purposes, I tinkered with Termux on my Samsung S9 FE tablet until I got a full-fledged XFCE window environment running. It uses Termux:X11, which is a stand-alone APK that functions as an X server client, and the Termux app running an X server. So I can seamlessly use apps installed on the tablet as Android apps (such as Brave browser) with terminal sessions in Termux (essentially the "TTY" layer) and other in a full-fat terminal emulator within XFCE (in my case I really like Alacritty) to do web development (serving stuff to http://localhost:8000) or desktop graphics/game programming that's easily transferrable to my other machines because it's written in a portable scripting language like Lua and Love2D.
I got it all working the way I like over the course of a single weekend of not-particularly-focused or effortful hobby-grade tinkering.
And not a single part of this would even be possible if I was trying to do it on an iPad, despite the iPad having like 10x the compute power of my Android tablet.
Why doesn’t Apple allow you to use native screen sharing to control other Macs on the iPad??? it is enraging
Consider that your use case is relevant for an infinitesimally small percentage of Apple's user base. It would be an utter waste of time for them to cater to you, and it's a waste of your money to buy their products.
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Very much agree with you, but I’m pretty surprised that you even bought the M4 given that all these limitations blocking the iPad from its potential have been there since the first iPad Pro first made the claim that it could be on par with a general purpose machine.
And especially given that the very cheapest iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard is not $1000 but $1,498 (and that’s with 256GB, which is a crippling size of storage for a device that you have any intentions of using for serious work - even on my phone I’m constantly regretting that storage choice).
Maybe you just have a lot more money than me though :D
You're right. The pro indeed is more expensive now. I bought mine with a trade in, so you're right.
I personally don't understand the point of an M4 iPad to begin with, let alone M4 Pro. What kind of CPU-intensive work can you do on an iPad? Video editing, I guess? You can't do any serious programming because there's no proper terminal emulator and you can't compile and run custom code. All you have are interpreted languages like Python and Ruby, but it seems like they still can't use the full power of an M4 because iPadOS doesn't let you spawn threads AFAIK.
Even for photo/video editing, why not use a Mac mini with the same (!) CPU and proper cooling? An iPad doesn't even have a fan, so surely the CPU will throttle.
"A glorified $1000 YouTube machine" is a pretty accurate description of an iPad LMAO
> iPadOS doesn't let you spawn threads AFAIK
It certainly lets you spawn threads. What it doesn't let you do is spawn processes (which blocks what a typical IDE would like to do, as well as things like the Chrome sandboxing model)
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This is the exact reason why the Apple Vision Pro is failing, because they put a toy OS on it instead of an actual operating system that is conducive for getting real work done.
if I could have macos on an ipad pro I'd stop using my macbook forever, it would be the perfect device, until then it's just a big phone, and since I replaced my iphone with a watch I don't need either pad or phone.
Yeah, I’ve had a similar experience. Even the features of iPadOS that work are buggy. iPadOS is a nerfed buggy mess compared to macOS
You realize there are a lot of "Pro" things that aren't programming. Yeah, it's a pretty bad choice for programming, so don't buy one for that. It's a fine choice for many other things. There's a whole world full of people who do different things. The iPad is not targeted as a work machine for the HN crowd.
I don’t understand why users even went to iOS-based devices as a daily driver for more serious computing. They need to be seen as appliances.
You wouldn’t use a Web TV and then get frustrated when you lose your magnum opus that you’d been working on the last three years.
The form factor is useful for a lot of application. My laptop/desktop is more powerful, but they are limited to places where I'm sitting down. There are a lot of jobs that are better done walking around. Trying to fix a machine - you want the computer with you. Trying to do a presentation - your presentation is better if you are not standing still.
What is serious computing? There are some things where I expect to have to be at my desk for hours to get them done and then a phone/tablet is worse. However there are also a lot of things better done when not at a desk and a laptop/desktop is worse.
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Because you slapped a "Pro" label in your marketing and sold it as a capable device to begin with, going on over about how powerful it is. That is directly targeted towards a professional audience.
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Apple hardware is underserved by software. iPad versions of the desktop applications are severely limited and I see no reason to upgrade my iPad Pro to the latest version, because I know all that computer power would be wasted.
This isn't just an Apple problem though. Even Samsung, Google / Qualcomm or Microsoft and Intel / AMD face the same business issue - hardware development has outpaced software development. Think about it - multiple core CPUs are essentially multiple CPUs packaged into one and Intel now offers 10+ core CPU for regular consumers. SSDs also give "outdated" hardware another lease of life. And as software companies find it more and more difficult to utilise completely the hardware powering them, they also face a dilemma of how to support hardware development by creating softwares that run "slower". This is best exemplified by the famous WinTel partnership between Microsoft and Intel, wherein every subsequent version of Windows required better hardware. Google Android too follows the same model. Today, including AI can slow down your computing. But it faces two major problem - 1) it clashes with the business model of AI companies that offer AI as a subscription service and 2) people can't afford the hardware to run AI (this is is why Windows 11 was forced to downgrade its minimum hardware requirement from 16gb to 8gb). (Also, the bottleneck of AI isn't computing power but memory throughput and bandwidth).
We've had GUI OSes and softwares running fine on 100Mhz CPUs once. One would think todays softwares would be blazing on the multi-core, multi-Ghz cpus, and multi-GB RAM and SSD hardwares. But the computing experience today still feels like the 90s experience (except for the increased stability, and less crashes).
Nobody wants to make software better because it isn't in their business interest to do so.
This reminds me of https://www.hyrumslaw.com/ ; users come to depend on any behavior of your program. I wonder if Apple had a sense of how much users depended on the old behavior; was it observable?
Another stupid quirk is USB-C HDMI output sometimes outputs 4:3 mirroring of the iPad screen even when in a full screen video. If you reconnect and fiddle with pausing/playing the content while screen locked, you can “trick” it to use presentation mode at the screens native resolution.
Half the problem is flagship apps like HBO/Netflix don’t implement this correctly.
Oh and this is all different if you have a keyboard attachment because only then are you allowed to “extend” display which can use the screen’s native resolution.
This is what happens when you do not own and control hardware you buy.
Keyword: buy, own, control
Any "autoupdating", or otherwise controlled device by the manufacturer is more an indefinite rental with horrific terms that basically amount to "lol screw you".
The device supports installing software, but only THEIR approved (cr)app store? Thats just a rental.
Device doesnt provide you root or administrator, but retains it for the company? Thats just a rental.
Features are sold one day, but an update removes them without your permission? Thats just a rental.
Cant revert an update that damaged your usability, cause the company prevents downgrades? Thats just a rental.
Thankfully, we already have laws on the books to cover this. There's plenty enough proof that these devices may be physically in the hands of someone who paid money to a retailer, and have proof of first sale. But it's demonstrable that these are indefinite rentals *masquerading* as sales. In other words, they are lying about a "sale". This should trigger Federal Trade Commission, under mass fraudulent rentals.
(And no, im looking at the capability and ownership of the whole device. Its obvious that a dumb device that just does the features its claimed to do is not a rental. But devices that have underlying inaccessible parts to the purchaser, BUT retain company control is the scope of this complaint. Nobody's arguing for a dumb coffee maker to have a web browser.)
in AI era, marginal cost of getting your 'anything' compatible with open systems and solutions is so low, that soon I expect only really stubborn, sad people still fighting with MacOS/Windows/PadOS
Define soon? I'd put a lot of money on the current crop of OS's still being dominant in 10 years. Most folks don't care enough to switch let alone "vibe" their own replacement software.
No non-technical user in their right mind will be trying to vibecode an OS and flashing it to some random off-brand tablet anytime soon.
As much as I wish 2027 to be the year of Linux Desktop, I'm afraid the companies will just "up the ante" by making all the APIs and boundaries much more convoluted, with AI watchdogs and remote servers along the way.
Airplay from within an app used to be different than airplay the entire screen.
This was invaluable especially from the photo app, where sharing the entire screen shows everything.
Starting airplay from within the photo app puts it into a form of slideshow, where I can scroll all the photos and videos and select one, one at a time for it to appear on the screen instead.
It is a much better experience for viewers on the screen not seeing the entire device screen. If you switch to another app, what's on screen doesn't get affected.
Ever since Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Apple has, deliberately or not, been introducing regressions into its software. Is it more secure? Yes. But things are getting uglier and uglier (I’m looking at you, Ive), and many things are broken or slower.
Honestly you get what you deserve if you try to use an ipad as your main computer. There's no faith in Apple ever fixing iPadOS - it's why they are releasing a touch screen Mac (Which is what they should have done in 2010).
Or it doesn’t need fixing and is perfectly adequate for the majority of buyers.
[dead]
Reason #1385275 why an iPad will never be a replacement for a real desktop OS no matter how much fancy hardware they shove in it.
> devastating regression in iPadOS 27
We clearly have different types of problems in our lives, the author and I.
Yes, this guy’s whole life and workflow for teaching to a large class was based around his iPad having a basic feature. If you don’t lecture to students using an iPad, probably you do have different problems.
That’s a frustration. That’s not the same thing as a devastation.
Yes, probably because that's not a feature that you really on daily. What of it?
If my iPad caught on fire and Apple stopped making it so I couldn’t replace it, it still wouldn’t be devastating.
It’s not about what features are used or not used or available or not available, it’s about having a little perspective.
iPads are something you give to a kid to keep them entertained. You should not make any production system wholly dependent on a platform you don't have root access to without some sort of backup or egress plan.
They are a hardware company. They want you to have to buy two devices. One for showing the presentation, another for notes and any kind of accompanying support material that is only for the presenter to see.